Reconsidering Ian McHarg

In 1969 Ian McHarg laid out a new approach to land-use planning. His seminal work, Design by Nature, blazed the trail for sustainable urban development. The road was paved with good intentions. But where exactly did it lead? And where do we go from here?Reconsidering Ian McHarg offers a fresh assessment of McHarg‘s lessons and legacy. It applauds his call for environmental stewardship while acknowledging its unintended results. For McHarg‘s idyllic developments at the edge of nature turned greenfield sites into suburban communities. They added to sprawl and made America more dependent on cars. And they may even have delayed the kind of urban redevelopment needed to make today‘s cities more sustainable.

1. Design with Nature: Promise and Pitfalls 2. The American Wilderness: An Evanescing Myth 3. Cities: Our Abode 4. Building, Dwelling, Greening 5. From Green to White: Ecology as a Design Ethic 6. Localism: A Participatory Ecology 7. On Public Art 8. Dallas: In Search of an Urban Future 9. Toward a Climax City 10. Beyond, Ahead

Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa, a principal with Philadelphia-based firm Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT), is a leader in landscape urbanism and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University‘s Graduate School of Design.